Today, Internet enabled group discussion vehicles are widely used by support organizations to help customers with issues that they are facing with the organization's products and by sales organizations to sell products or services.
One type of group discussion vehicle is a discussion forum, also known as an Internet forum, web forum, message board, discussion board, (electronic) discussion group, discussion forum, bulletin board, fora, or simply forum. Forums are facilities on the World Wide Web for holding discussions and posting user generated content.
Forums generally include a website composed of a number of member-written threads. Each thread entails a discussion or conversation in the form of a series of member-written posts and may refer to a posted topic. Stated another way, forums are containers for threads started by a community of users. Threads in a forum are either flat (posts are listed in chronological order) or threaded (each post is made in reply to a parent post).
Depending on the permissions of community members as defined by the board's administrator, members can post replies to existing threads, start new threads, edit their posts, start new topics, and change their settings. On most forums, users have a small picture or avatar located around their name. Forums can be configured to allow visitors to post anonymously or require members to attribute posts to a registered username.
Forums come in complex and varying styles. Commonly, forums contain many different boards that direct a user to a sub-forum. Forums differ from electronic mailing lists in that mailing lists deliver automatically new messages to the subscriber while forums require the member to visit the website and check for new posts. Due to the possibility of members missing replies to threads they are interested in, many modern forums offer an email notification feature, where an email is sent automatically to all users, who have chosen to be notified of new replies, informing them that a new post has been made, and RSS feeds (discussed below) that allow people to see the summary of the new posts using an aggregator software. Forums differ from chat rooms and instant messaging because forum participants do not have to be online at the same time; forums also usually deal with one topic and personal exchanges are commonly discouraged.
Another type of group discussion vehicle is a blog. A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as a manufacturer's products, services, politics, or local news. In the context of a blog, threads are topical connections between messages such as on a metaphorical “corkboard”.
Blogs come in varying types that differ in the way the content is delivered or written. Blogs are classified by the media type used by the blog (e.g., vlogs (or blogs including videos), linklogs (or blogs including links), sketchblogs (or blogs including sketches), photoblogs (or blogs including photos), and tumblelogs (or blogs having shorter posts and mixed media types)), the device used to compose the blog (e.g., moblogs (or blogs written by a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant), and blog subject or genre (e.g., political blogs, travel blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, or legal blogs (known as blawgs)). Unlike blogs, forums typically allow anyone to start a new discussion (or thread) or reply to an existing thread.
Forums and blogs frequently use RSS to facilitate publication of information. RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content. “RSS” variously refers to Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0), Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91 and RSS1.0), and RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0).
Users of RSS content use programs called feed readers or aggregators. Users subscribe to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed. The reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to determine if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked and, if so, retrieve that content and present it to the particular user. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed”, “webfeed”, “RSS stream”, or “RSS channel.” A new syndication specification, known as Atom, improves on RSS by relying on standard XML features, by specifying a payload container that can handle many different kinds of content unambiguously.
When forums and blogs are used by contact centers, each customer query is treated as a new work item for the center. The way that work is distributed to the contact center agents, however, is unmodulated resulting in wasted resources. Modulating work assignment based on the type and quantity or work currently assigned to an agent is the domain of the multimedia contact center. A multimedia contact center is capable of using complex rules to determine which agent a particular piece of work should be assigned to. It would be ideal, if work generated by a discussion forum or blog could be routed using a multimedia contact center.
From a contact center perspective, using a discussion forum or blog as a source has several advantages. For example, a discussion forum or blog can be viewed and searched by customers with similar issues. This search capability results in solutions to problems being found by the customers without contact center agent involvement. A discussion forum or blog populated with the right type of information can serve as a channel to advertise and sell products in a much more targeted fashion. A discussion forum or blog allows community members to answer posts as well. This further reduces the burden on an agent in the contact center to answer the questions.
However, to realize the value that a discussion forum or blog brings to the table, the work sourced by the discussion forum has to enter the contact center in a form that can be modulated effectively by the contact center. Otherwise, multiple agents may respond to the same post, which leads to contact center inefficiencies.